The Needle's Eye Read Online Free PDF Page A

for a few brief swervings for salt or bread, until the soup was over: so he concentrated his attention upon his other neighbour, a tall divorced woman who said that she ran an agency for disseminating news upon artistic and social events: ‘an official grapevine, you might say,’ she said to him, flashing at him some very white and even teeth, and he could not tell if she were truly commercial in spirit, which he might have understood if not respected: or whether she truly interested herself in such matters. He suspected the latter, for there was something of the enthusiast in her manner, something both excitable and gullible, that he recognized from his domestic experiences: though this was perhaps merely a front, an attractive shine, upon the harder business of making gossip pay. He contented himself in listening to her, for he had little to say, being well aware that a mention of his own profession, even if offered in a spirit of polite exchange of information, would have created in her a response of instant, pitying boredom: so he listened, and asked questions – being quite well enough informed, alas, to ask the right questions – and from time to time, as he looked down at his green soup, he also looked slightly askance at Rose Vassiliou’s hand, which was crumbling to pieces, with an untiring restless purposeless motion, the brown wholemeal bread on her plate. It interested him, this hand, and he remembered the touch of it in greeting: it had been light and dry, and the back of it was brown and slightly crazed like an old earthenware pot. He could not recollect that he had ever seen so fine a mesh of wrinkles, that had about them no suggestion of age, or of loosening of the skin: they were of the surface, like small scratches. The hand looked not old, but childlike. One nail only had been bitten: a confined neurosis, attached to the index finger. There was a ring on the middle finger with a white stone in it: a sardonyx. The hand hovered over the bread, restlessly plucking and seizing and crumbling, like a friend or a small bird.
    When the soup plates had been removed, amidst conventional cries of appreciation, which Diana accepted quite graciously, already convinced that the casserole would prove inedible, Rose Vassiliou turned to Simon, correctly, and smiled a little anxiously – (eyestrain,
perhaps, had caused that look of concentration, those hair-like crowsfeet) – and said to him, ‘You were at college with Nick, I believe?’ and he said that yes, indeed he had been, and at school too, oddly enough: ‘You come from the North, then?’ she said, ‘I would not have known it’ – and he and Nick exchanged glances, and both agreed that they had camouflaged themselves well. ‘The North East, it was,’ said Nick. ‘The North East. Simon never goes back, do you, Simon?’
    ‘I have no cause to go back,’ said Simon. ‘Everyone has moved. My mother lives near Hastings now, so there is no cause to go back.’
    ‘You don’t dislike it, then?’ she said, left in dialogue with him because Nick’s other neighbour had claimed his attention: and he replied, ‘No, not particularly, but my wife does, and so we don’t go –’
    ‘Why does she dislike it?’ said Rose, and then, thinking better of the question, attempted to disguise it by helping herself to some vegetables. But it was too late. He replied, saying that she disliked it because she too was from the same region, and had always hated it with a real passion, and now could hardly be dragged there for any reason. ‘Sad, to hate the place where one was born,’ said Rose, and he agreed that it was sad, but common, and asked her, aware of rashness, where she had been born herself. ‘In the country,’ she said, sighing, as though the phrase explained itself. ‘In the country.’ He found it difficult to interrogate her, aware that there were facts about her that he might have been expected to know, but she continued, after a pause, and after a